T-Bone Walker

For The Record...

Full name, Aaron Thibeaux Walker; born May 28, 1910, in Linden, Tex.; son of Ranee Walker (a musician) and Movelia Jimerson (a musician); married Vida Lee in 1935; children: three; died of pneumonia March 16, 1975. Worked as a professional musician at dances and carnivals in Dallas with such groups as the Cab Calloway Band, the Coley Jones Dallas String Band, and the Lawson Brooks Band, ? 1926-34; recorded two singles for Columbia Records, 1929, and recorded with many other bands in the 1940s; moved to the West Coast and performed at the Little Harlem Club, the Trocadero, and other clubs, 1934-40; moved to the East Coast and worked with the Les Hite Orchestra, 1940; formed and appeared with his own touring band, 1940-1975; traveled with the band in England, 1965, and throughout Europe, 1966, 1968, and 1969. Awards: Grammy for best ethnic or traditional recording, for Good Fee/in’, 1971; Lifetime Achievement Award, Guitar Player, 1985. Addresses: Record company—Fantasy/Prestige/Milestone, 10th and Parker, Berkeley, CA 94710.

Jazz, blues guitarist, songwriter

Arguably the first musician to employ an electric guitar, T-Bone Walker is without doubt the one who laid the foundation for what is known as modern urban blues. Walker’s sophisticated playing in the 1930s and 1940s bridged the gap between jazz and blues and created a style which has influenced every electric guitarist since. "He has a touch that nobody has been able to duplicate," stated B.B. King in Guitar Player. "I knew I just had to go out and get an electric guitar." In Sheldon Harris’s Blues Who’s Who a list of artists Walker has influenced contains nearly every major blues (and quite a few rock) guitarists in the last four decades.

Walker’s meal ticket was his ability to play single string, hornphrased solos that brought the guitar out of its role as an accompanying, rhythm-oriented instrument. He was one of the first musicians who proved that a guitar could go head-to-head with brass, pianos, and woodwinds as a legitimate solo instrument.

Walker was obviously musically gifted, but electricity helped to bring that out and let him rise above his contemporaries. "It took Walker to exploit electricity," wrote Robert Palmer in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. "By using his amplifier’s volume control to sustain pitches, and combining this technique with the single string-bending and finger vibrato practiced by traditional bluesmen, Walker in effect invented a new instrument."

He was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker (the nickname T-Bone is a slang version of his middle name) in 1910 in Linden, Texas, and was raised in Dallas after 1912. Walker was bom into a musical family with both his parents working as musicians. He took up the guitar at age 13 but played various other stringed instruments as well. Walker’s earliest influences were Lonnie Johnson, Scrapper Blackwell, Leroy Carr, and Blind Lemon Jefferson—all advanced stylists at the time. In his early years, Walker worked as "lead boy" for Jefferson, leading the blind guitarist around the city to play for crowds and pass the hat. By the time he was 16, Walker was making enough money on his own in Dallas to become a professional, working various dances and carnivals.

In 1929 he recorded two singles for Columbia Records, "Trinity River Blues" and "Witchita Falls Blues," as Oak Cliff T-Bone (Walker lived in the Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff). He continued playing with a 16-piece band formed during his school days with Lawson Brooks until 1934, when he quit and moved to Los Angeles. Walker turned his job over to another guitarist who went on to become as important and equally influential, Charlie Christian. The two had at one time performed a street act together that combined guitar and bass playing with some fancy footwork. Christian later rose to stardom in the late 1930s as a featured soloist with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, but his brilliant career was cut short by tuberculosis in 1941.

Walker made his living on the West Coast playing with various small combos in the thriving jazz clubs of Los Angeles. In 1939 he joined Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra as a singer, guitarist, and composer. It’s hard to say who was the first electric guitarist at this point, but Walker, Christian, Eddie Durham, and Floyd Smith were all beginning to see the advantages an amplified guitar’s volume had in a club setting when competing with the full horn section of a big band. "I was out there four or five years on my own before they all started playing amplified," Walker stated in the liner notes of T-Bone Walker: Classics of Modern Blues. "I recorded my T-Bone Blues’ with Les Hite in 1939, but I’d been playing amplified guitar a long time before that."

Regardless of who was first, it was Walker’s playing that made him great. "[He has] striking originality and expressive power," wrote Pete Welding in Guitar World.

"[His playing is] fleet, supercharged, harmonically resourceful, rhythmically adroit and, above all, immensely exciting." Walker was a consummate showman to boot. He played a large Gibson hollowbody guitar, held straight out from his chest and parallel to the floor (which contributed in part to his unique tone) but would cut loose and play behind his back, between his legs or do the splits in an effort to get the crowd going. He had, as Dan Forte stated in Guitar Player, "the uncanny ability to burn and stay cool at the same time."

By the 1940s Walker had made a name for himself and embarked on a solo career. He combined blues, shuffles, and jump tunes into his act and eventually scored a hit with "Mean Old World" in the mid-40s. However, it was in 1947 that Walker produced his most famous tune, "Stormy Monday," which is probably the all-time blues standard. "It’s just like a national anthem; it tells the truth," said vocalist Jimmy Witherspoon in The Guitar Player Book. "It tells the strife of working people getting paid on Friday, Saturday they go out and have a ball." Walker later played on Witherspoon’s Evenin’ LP and obviously had a profound impact on the singer. "He’s one of the few people who put dignity into the blues," continued Witherspoon. "He’s the Charlie Parker of guitars when it comes to blues…. No one else can touch T-Bone."

Walker may have been the one to elevate the status of the blues, but the lifestyle it demanded certainly took its toll on him. He stayed in southern California during the 1950s and toured endlessly into the following decade. The stress of travel combined with heavy drinking, gambling, and bad business dealings, took their toll on him. On March 16, 1975, T-Bone Walker succumbed to pneumonia, bringing an end to one of the most spectacular and innovative musical careers ever.

Pete Welding wrote in the liner notes of the excellent and wide-ranging anthology, T-Bone Walker: Classics of Modern Blues, "In length of service, adaptability and continuous creative activity, perhaps only Coleman Hawkins or Duke Ellington [has] matched him."

Selected discography

Singles for Columbia Records; as Oak Cliff T-Bone
"Trinity River Blues," 1929.
"Witchita Falls Blues," 1929.

LPs; with Jimmy Witherspoon
T-Bone Blues, Atlantic, 1956.
The Truth, Brunswick, 1968.
T-Bone Walker: Classics of Modern Blues, Blue Note, 1976.
T-Bone Jumps Again, tic, 1956.
Evenin’ Blues, Prestige, 1988.

Sources
Books
The Guitar Player Book, editors of Guitar Player, Grove Press, Inc., 1979.
Guralnick, Peter, The Listener’s Guide to the Blues, Facts on File, 1982.
Harris, Sheldon, Blues Who’s Who, Da Capo, 1979.
Kozlnn, Allan, Pete Welding, Dan Forte, and Gene Santoro, The Guitar—The History The Music The Players, Quill, 1984.
Miller, Jim, editor, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1976.

Periodicals
Guitar Player, March 1977; December 1985; January 1987;December 1987; February 1988.
Guitar World, December 1987.

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• Genres: Blues

Biography

Modern electric blues guitar can be traced directly back to this Texas-born pioneer, who began amplifying his sumptuous lead lines for public consumption circa 1940 and thus initiated a revolution so total that its tremors are still being felt today.

Few major postwar blues guitarists come to mind that don't owe T-Bone Walker an unpayable debt of gratitude. B.B. King has long cited him as a primary influence, marveling at Walker's penchant for holding the body of his guitar outward while he played it. Gatemouth Brown, Pee Wee Crayton, Goree Carter, Pete Mayes, and a wealth of other prominent Texas-bred axemen came stylistically right out of Walker during the late '40s and early '50s. Walker's nephew, guitarist R.S. Rankin, went so far as to bill himself as T-Bone Walker, Jr. for a 1962 single on Dot, "Midnight Bells Are Ringing" (with his uncle's complete blessing, of course; the two had worked up a father-and-son-type act long before that).

Aaron Thibeault Walker was a product of the primordial Dallas blues scene. His stepfather, Marco Washington, stroked the bass fiddle with the Dallas String Band, and T-Bone followed his stepdad's example by learning the rudiments of every stringed instrument he could lay his talented hands on. One notable visitor to the band's jam sessions was the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson. During the early '20s, Walker led the sightless guitarist from bar to bar as the older man played for tips.

In 1929, Walker made his recording debut with a single 78 for Columbia, "Wichita Falls Blues"/"Trinity River Blues," billed as Oak Cliff T-Bone. Pianist Douglas Fernell was his musical partner for the disc. Walker was exposed to some pretty outstanding guitar talent during his formative years; besides Jefferson, Charlie Christian -- who would totally transform the role of the guitar in jazz with his electrified riffs much as Walker would with blues, was one of his playing partners circa 1933.

T-Bone Walker split the Southwest for Los Angeles during the mid-'30s, earning his keep with saxophonist Big Jim Wynn's band with his feet rather than his hands as a dancer. Popular bandleader Les Hite hired Walker as his vocalist in 1939. Walker sang "T-Bone Blues"with the Hite aggregation for Varsity Records in 1940, but didn't play guitar on the outing. It was about then, though, that his fascination with electrifying his axe bore fruit; he played L.A. clubs with his daring new toy after assembling his own combo, engaging in acrobatic stage moves -- splits, playing behind his back -- to further enliven his show.

Capitol Records was a fledgling Hollywood concern in 1942, when Walker signed on and cut "Mean Old World" and "I Got a Break Baby" with boogie master Freddie Slack hammering the 88s. This was the first sign of the T-Bone Walker that blues guitar aficionados know and love, his fluid, elegant riffs and mellow, burnished vocals setting a standard that all future blues guitarists would measure themselves by.

Chicago's Rhumboogie Club served as Walker's home away from home during a good portion of the war years. He even cut a few sides for the joint's house label in 1945 under the direction of pianist Marl Young. But after a solitary session that same year for Old Swingmaster that soon made its way on to another newly established logo, Mercury, Walker signed with L.A.-based Black & White Records in 1946 and proceeded to amass a stunning legacy.

The immortal "Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)" was the product of a 1947 Black & White date with Teddy Buckner on trumpet and invaluable pianist Lloyd Glenn in the backing quintet. Many of Walker's best sides were smoky after-hours blues, though an occasional up-tempo entry -- "T-Bone Jumps Again," a storming instrumental from the same date, for example -- illustrated his nimble dexterity at faster speeds.

Walker recorded prolifically for Black & White until the close of 1947, waxing classics like the often-covered "T-Bone Shuffle" and "West Side Baby," though many of the sides came out on Capitol after the demise of Black & White. In 1950, Walker turned up on Imperial. His first date for the L.A. indie elicited the after-hours gem "Glamour Girl" and perhaps the penultimate jumping instrumental in his repertoire, "Strollin' With Bones" (Snake Sims' drum kit cracks like a whip behind Walker's impeccable licks).

Walker's 1950-54 Imperial stint was studded with more classics: "The Hustle Is On," "Cold Cold Feeling," "Blue Mood," "Vida Lee" (named for his wife), "Party Girl," and, from a 1952 New Orleans jaunt, "Railroad Station Blues," which was produced by Dave Bartholomew. Atlantic was T-Bone Walker's next stop in 1955; his first date for them was an unlikely but successful collaboration with a crew of Chicago mainstays (harpist Junior Wells, guitarist Jimmy Rogers, and bassist Ransom Knowling among them). Rogers found the experience especially useful; he later adapted Walker's "Why Not" as his own Chess hit "Walking by Myself." With a slightly more sympathetic L.A. band in staunch support, Walker cut two follow-up sessions for Atlantic in 1956-57. The latter date produced some amazing instrumentals ("Two Bones and a Pick," "Blues Rock," "Shufflin' the Blues") that saw him dueling it out with his nephew, jazzman Barney Kessel (Walker emerged victorious in every case).

Unfortunately, the remainder of Walker's discography isn't of the same sterling quality for the most part. As it had with so many of his peers from the postwar R&B era, rock's rise had made Walker's classy style an anachronism (at least during much of the 1960s). He journeyed overseas on the first American Folk Blues Festival in 1962, starring on the Lippmann & Rau-promoted bill across Europe with Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, and a host of other American luminaries. A 1964 45 for Modern and an obscure LP on Brunswick preceded a pair of BluesWay albums in 1967-68 that restored this seminal pioneer to American record shelves.

European tours often beckoned. A 1968 visit to Paris resulted in one of his best latter-day albums, I Want a Little Girl, for Black & Blue (and later issued stateside on Delmark). With expatriate tenor saxophonist Hal "Cornbread" Singer and Chicago drummer S.P. Leary picking up Walker's jazz-tinged style brilliantly, the guitarist glided through a stellar set list.

Good Feelin', a 1970 release on Polydor, won a Grammy for the guitarist, though it doesn't rank with his best efforts. A five-song appearance on a 1973 set for Reprise, Very Rare, was also a disappointment. Persistent stomach woes and a 1974 stroke slowed Walker's career to a crawl, and he died in 1975.

No amount of written accolades can fully convey the monumental importance of what T-Bone Walker gave to the blues. He was the idiom's first true lead guitarist, and undeniably one of its very best. ~ Bill Dahl, Rovi

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